The consortium brings together 6 partners from 5 countries to addresses the problem of how to accelerate improvement in school and pupil performance through up-skilling school leaders to undertake school transformation. The focus is on schools in Socio-economically challenged areas and the project addresses key issues from the EPNoSL report which highlighted the impact that strong school leadership can have on equality of opportunity and the longer term life chances of young people. The latest data shows that that ET 2020 targets will be met without acceleration in current trends. The project addresses the Erasmus+ Priorities of improving the leadership and management of schools and developing new training resources through the methodology of exchanging experiences and good practice, through peer learning activities. The starting point is a study visit for school leadership trainers from four EU countries to analyse best practice from UK schools which have been transformed from ‘low’ to ‘high-performing’ in a short period of time. The partnership will explore the tools and strategies used by such schools to develop a model which can be applied across Europe. The project examines the characteristics of successful school transformation, the practical measures taken, and develops a new set of tools and training resources, trialled at a European level, to up-skill school leadership teams to transform low performing schools into high performing schools. The outputs will be: • A project website hosting downloadable tools and resources and case studies • Training modules and case studies which have been piloted in both Middle and High Schools • A handbook to support the training • A set of case studies from 5 countries illustrating practical tools and strategies used for school transformation • A research publication on the strategies adopted, the impact and policy recommendations • A set of dissemination materials and seminars in 5 countries • A final international conference and series of workshops to promote the training resources Although the lingua franca will be English, resources will also be developed in Hungarian, Bulgarian, Estonian and Portuguese. The initial impact will be a demonstration of improvement in 16 schools in 4 countries involving 100+ school leaders. The project will be supported by a research strand which will explore the methodologies adopted, the impact, further issues arising from the trials and a set of recommendations to be fed back to the European Policy Network on School Leadership. Longer term we will make the resources available to a much wider group of school leaders through sharing with existing networks, promoting them with training providers and demonstrating to decision makers how the tools and methodologies could be adopted as policy or best practice.